One of the things that struck me about Tuesday’s debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush was how far Republicans managed in the last two decades to push the political establishment toward the Right on cultural issues. Gore immediately launched into denouncing “cultural pollution” at the beginning of the debate and used the phrase again in his final remarks.
Add to that Ralph Nader running around the country talking about the evils of sex and violence in movies, television and computer games and the conclusion is obvious — the real winner of this year’s election is going to be Pat Buchanan.
When Buchanan gave his fiery speeches at successive Republican conventions calling for a cultural war, Democrats cried foul, many Republicans thought he went overboard, and Left magazines like The Nation went to town on him. Dan Qualye, who wanted to be Pat Buchanan-lite was roundly ridiculed for his claim that the depiction of Murphy Brown becoming a single mother glorified single motherhood and was a bad message to be sending to teenage girls.
In the upcoming election, however, four of the five presidential candidates who are going to poll more than 1 percent of the vote completely embrace Buchanan and Qualye’s message. To see how close the candidates actually are, I visited their web sites and pulled off quotes from speeches by Nader, Gore, Buchanan and Bush. See if you can tell which quote belongs to which candidate:
- After generations of feeding our children this filth and permitting moral polluters to dump their poison into our cultural well, why are we surprised that ours has become a sick society.
- To start with, we all share a responsibility for changing a toxic culture that too often glorifies violence and cruelty.
- We live in a culture of moral indifference, where movies and videos glamorize violence and tolerance is touted as a great virtue.
- It is time to say that our children matter more than this brutalizing entertainment.
The real surprise was that from the speeches I could find (and I may have missed a few), only one of the four candidates who denounced the pollution of American culture didn’t also call for legislative and/or judicial punishment of content producers — George W. Bush. In fact, Bush’s statements on the matter have been relatively low key compared to the rest of the field, probably because he wants to avoid the sort of cultural warrior taint that dogged Buchanan and Bob Dole (though Bush did champion the endorsement he received from South Carolina’s attorney general who has promised a lawsuit against Hollywood for targeting minors).
Only one candidate, the Libertarian Party’s Harry Browne, pointed out the obvious that, “If you ask the government to impose morality, you are asking that moral questions be decided by those with the most political power. This means that people like Teddy Kennedy and Newt Gingrich will dictate personal morality to you.” Unfortunately, Browne doesn’t have a chance, and so it is Buchanan’s ideas that will win in November, and that, unless counteracted, will lead to the sort of restrictions on speech of which Buchanan could only have dreamed when he fired the first salvo in his self-declared “cultural war.”
(The quotes, by the way are from Buchanan, Gore, Bush, and Nader respectively).